The three states

earned

The assessment ran and the person earned some part of the award. This state is always published with its percentage — a bare "earned" with no number would be an endorsement, and the movement does not issue endorsements. It issues percentages with the derivation attached.

not earned

The assessment ran, the arithmetic completed on adequate information, and no part of the award was earned. This is a real finding, made on real material, and it is rendered as one: a solid dark red silhouette.

unknown

We do not have enough information, or the assessment has not been run. Solid gray-brown.

This is where most records start, and it is the honest state for a roster that grows by contribution. It is not a soft way of saying "bad". It is the absence of an assessment.

Resolution order

The states resolve in a fixed order, and the order matters more than it looks: a record is unknown until there is enough material to assess it, and only then can it resolve to earned or not earned. Sufficiency is a published policy value, not a judgment call made per record.

Doing it the other way — assessing on whatever exists and reporting a confident-looking number — is how a system ends up publishing a red mark on somebody because one podcast episode happened to exist.

One shape, three fills

All three states are the same silhouette at the same size, cut from the same master, differing only in fill. Two of the fills are exact stated colours that live in one place and are never re-invented in page styling.

The reason is not tidiness. If the states differed in shape or size, a reader would learn to read the silhouette as the finding, and layouts would start treating one state as visually heavier than another. One shape forces the colour to carry the meaning, and forces every surface to render all three with equal weight.